"I'd be happier if there was still a stigma to drawing unemployment insurance or welfare, rather than the government broadening the access to entitlements. As a Canadian, I was raised with an honest respect and conviction for the social safety net, maintaining a floor that people won't fall below. But when we've got third and fourth generation welfare families, when we've got a sizable segment of our population content to subsist on the crumbs that drop to the floor, we're failing as a society. Short-term help in times of need has become long-term maintenance and a viable lifestyle choice. It's a drain on the public purse and deadening to the soul."

I agree that being on welfare should be something that everyone should strive to avoid. When it was introduced, there was a certain work ethic in place where people wanted to work, where there was honor and dignity in earning a living.  The welfare system was put in place for people who couldn't get jobs, however much they looked, who were too physically broken (some by workplace injuries, others by disease) to work. 

It replaced the undignified solutions of begging for money to buy food, subsisting on charities (that might in turn reject the "unworthy"), being put in workhouses or poorhouses, turning to crime or prostitution (not that those latter options were succefully eliminated).

And for the rich and the middle classes, it removed the threat of political instability, the prospect of an uprising with communist overtones (or really just riots to get acces to food and shelter).

And all these welfare and union compromises were made in parts as check and balances on the employer's side of things, the "capitalist engine of society" which also depends on ethical approaches in order to function.  When capitalist ethics fail, you get a stock market crisis like the current one, and working people get treated like crap. When worker's ethic fail, you get welfare abuse, and a drain on the economy from that side.

There does need to be a return to ethical behaviour, but it needs to happen on both sides.  The guys on wall street need to be watched and prodded back towards respecting the ethical framework that makes capitalism work to the benefit of society just as much as people on welfare need to be prodded back towards respecting the ethical framework that makes the social safety net work to the benefit of society.

I am forever a sceptic towards welfare reform, because it mostly seems like it's about taking away benefits indiscriminately and the people who are most in favor of welfare reform also seem least interested in ethical reform of the banking, stock market, insurance and financial industry. It seems one-sided to me, and that's disturbing.

I am sure there are others who have similar impressions that there is too much focus on the financial industry and too little on welfare abuse from the left. 

  It kind of saddens me that it's come to this.  Ever since the Vietnam era, I can see a trend of "poisoning the well" in political debate which seems only to have escalated to the point that the extremes are being used to play against the middle.  Our mass media has had its part in exploiting this by shutting out actual discussion of the issues involved in favor of spectacular shouting contests.  That it shows favoritism towards the "progressives" (as commentator Glenn Beck has called them) makes it hard for me to truly call them "liberal".

   What really disturbs me about all of this is that I find it easy to see the seeds of another civil war in it.  The 19th Century civil war that did so much damage to the United States in that era started out pretty much the same way, with the opposing sides on the issues of slavery and States' rights standing further and further apart and getting ever more belligerent until someone started the fire that raged into the veritable inferno of that conflict.  Not one of them seemed to care about the aftermath of it.

   Back to the subject on hand, it would seem to me that Quesada stepped in it here.  Unfortunately, the damage had been done years ago when they decided in other comics that only white males were appropriate villains and that any villainy on the part of "minorities" was actually a noble cause.  They wouldn't show the damage that some on the left were inflicting with their own prejudicial acts.  This latest episode is just one of those rare instances where it was exposed and there was a reaction to it beyond the fringes of the comicbook-reading public.

   Still, I think there should be a debate on the issues represented in the anti-taxing movement.  How much is going too far?  What about the interests of those future generations who'll probably end up holding the bill for all the expansive programs being proposed by the current government using those taxes to be levied upon them?  At what point do we realize that villifying business owners as a whole only leads to no one wanting to start a business up out of fear of becoming a target for those now prejudiced against them (and thus taking away employment opportunities for those who would want and need the jobs to provide income for life's necessities in the first place)?

   The problem with trying to tie that into a comicbook which paints things in simplistic "hero vs villain" colors is that a true balance in the perspectives can be lost if the editors and/or creative teams bring their own (or popular) prejudices into play in the storytelling...

"decided in other comics that only white males were appropriate villains and that any villainy on the part of "minorities" was actually a noble cause"

When, where, was this?  Admittedly, it's been about 25 years since I was a regular reader of Marvel.  But I recall characters such as Pirahna Jones, Big Brother, Lionfang, the first Chemistro, actually most of the Luke Cage villains were black.  It's possible that some of that may have shifted when Cage merged together with Ironfist, though I don't really recall that as being the case in a major way.

Then let's not forget Pennysworth, and how the rich Kyle Richmond left him in charge of everything so that he could fund the Sons of the Serpent.  That didn't come off as a noble cause by Pennysworth.  Did things really change that much after 1985 to the point where black villains become unkosher?  Just wondering.